Understanding Low Review Ratings in Online Communities: A Personality Based Approach

Online communities like Yelp thrive when users participate actively by writing good and useful reviews. While useful reviews are needed to keep the community active, understanding the users who post low rated and unhelpful reviews is also important, so that developers can implement persuasive strategies targeted at this group of users. In this paper, we identify those users who post low rated, unhelpful reviews and their personality types in Yelp using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) tool. The result of the analysis reveals that users who post unhelpful reviews are mostly of the personality type neuroticism. Using partial least squares structural equation modelling, we further explored the susceptibility of the different personality groups of users to rewards as a means of influencing them to write more useful reviews. Our results show that only the users that are high is extraversion who post unhelpful reviews are susceptible to rewards. This result demonstrates that rewards might not be persuasive to most of the Yelp users who post unhelpful reviews, hence the use of other persuasive strategies should be explored to influence users to post helpful reviews. The result of this study can be helpful to developers and stakeholders of online communities in implementing personalized influence strategies that work.